The Peoples Trust for Engangered Species has a grant available for those doing some conservation work for Dormice.
£1,000 award for landowners helping to reconnect our countryside for dormice
About the dormouse
With its big, dark eyes, golden coat and furry tail, the dormouse is an attractive animal, well-loved by the public and immortalised in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Dormice live in woodland and thick hedges, feeding on a variety of flowers, fruit, nuts and insects. During the last century the dormouse has become extinct from half its former range in England due to the isolation and loss of suitable woodland habitat. The destruction and poor management of hedgerows has also increased their isolation by removing safe routes to new areas.
About Reconnecting our countryside
This award has been created to encourage farmers, landowners and land managers to carry out active conservation work that will benefit hazel dormice and other hedgerow and woodland creatures that thrive in a species-rich environment. This project is seeking to provide sound management advice for landowners and encourage the public to become involved in conserving this flagship species.
How to get involved?
People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES) has been involved in dormouse conservation work for fifteen years, in particular monitoring all known dormouse populations around the country and releasing captive-bred populations to woodlands where they once occurred to re-establish this species back in its former range. Now we need to encourage these populations to naturally expand back into the wider countryside, and we need your help to achieve this.
Does your land contain hedgerows and/ or deciduous woodland? Could wildlife benefit from work you have or would be able to carry out, such as:
· planting new hedgerows
· gapping up existing hedges
· laying existing hedges
· thin standards in woodlands
· coppicing hazel and other shrubs or trees
If so, we would like you to enter the 2008 Reconnecting our countryside competition. The winner will receive £1,000 with second and third place receiving £500 and £250 respectively. Closing date tbc.
This competition is looking to celebrate landowners and farmers who link or create areas of good quality habitat culminating in the largest continuous cover of dormouse-friendly habitat by planting, coppicing and/ or gapping up. The cover may include new or established woodland / hedgerows and would ideally connect habitats under different ownerships. The habitat does not need to be mature enough to support dormouse populations at the current time, or even be in current dormouse range, providing that in the long-term it will become suitable.
What to do?
Please write to Reconnecting our countryside competition, PTES, 15 Cloisters House, 8 Battersea Park Road, London, SW8 4BG or email [email protected] or call 020 7498 4533 for a pack and entry forms.
... and please contribute to this forum if you have some experience of Dormice in your woods!